We suggested in yesterday's post that some books in series exist only because a particular publisher decided that a particular set of books could be made a series by publishing such books in identical format. And we noted that classics and canonical books often receive such treatment.
One of the oldest and best known of these types of series is the Loeb Classical Library. Founded in 1911, and published continuously since then, the Loeb Classical Library--as explained in its initial volumes--sought to
make the beauty and learning, the philosophy and wit of the great writers of ancient Greece and Rome once more accessible by means of translations that are in themselves real pieces of literature, a thing to be read for the pure joy of it, and not dull transcripts of ideas that suggest in every line the existence of a finer original form from which the average reader is shut out
The idea, which has not changed in nearly 100 years, was to make the literature of ancient Greece and Rome available even to those who could not read either language in the original, and to do so in a format that would fit easily "into a gentleman's pocket." The volumes--green for Greek authors, red for Latin authors--are each only a little larger than 6x4 inches:
One of the challenges for anyone collecting a series like this is that such a series often never reaches completion. The earliest translations in the Loeb Classical Library, for example, were made at a time when pains were taken "not to give offense." Since many ancient Greek and Latin writers were quite ... lusty ... some of their Greek and Latin wound up getting translated only as footnotes, and often in a language other than English (Italian was a popular choice). Loeb began re-translating many of these earlier volumes in the late 1960s-early 1970s, and expects this project to continue for some time....
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